Marcel Amsallem, President of CRIF Lyon, addressing the President of the National Assembly, expressed the satisfaction of the Jewish community in the Rhône-Alpes region for the efforts deployed by the authorities to counter anti-Semitism and racism. He thanked Jean-Olivier Viout, Public Prosecutor for the Court of Appeals in Lyon, for having set up, for the first time in France, an anti-Semitism watch unit. The President of CRIF Rhône-Alpes also insisted on the positive effects of Jewish-Muslim events organized jointly by CRIF Rhône-Alpes and the Muslim organizations CRCM and ANEB, in the context of the Friendship Tour de France, an initiative of Rabbi Michel Serfaty.
Jean-Louis Debré, for his part and following on from the speech by the national President of CRIF, reminded the audience that “it was here in Lyon that in July 1943 was created a General Committee for Jewish Defence responsible for organizing the resistance and which led to the clandestine creation of CRIF, whose charter was finally drawn up in 1944. Its first task was to unify the salvage operations.”
Jean-Louis Debré concluded his speech by recalling for the first time in public his personal attachment to the memory of the Holocaust (his great grandfather, Simon Debré, was a famous French rabbi; Simon’s son Robert, a leading medical doctor, converted to Catholicism): “I did not experience the war but I shall always remember what I was told by my grand parents, the suffering of my family, but also the identification number tattooed on the arm of a member of my family. For the rest of my life I shall remember my visit to certain concentration camps. My parents did not wish their children, who had not experienced the war, to forget the tragedy they had lived through.”
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